Samsung Begins Mass-Production of 8GB NAND Memory

If current NAND Flash Memory sizes simply aren't big enough for you, then you're in luck. Samsung has announced that it has begun mass-production on 60nm NAND Flash memory chips, meaning that it won't be long before we start seeing these high-capacity memory in cell phones, portable media devices, and and 2G iPod nanos. According to Samsung, 8GB is now possibly by basically taking two 4GB NAND packages and putting them on top of each other.

From Samsung press release, it appears that 8GB chips ren't the only thing that the company has planned:

Samsung plans to further utilize its 8-Gb NAND flash memory chip in Samsung’s high-density MLC NAND, called moviNAND, to produce a 2GB-level NAND market solution. The recently introduced moviNAND combines NAND flash memory and a NAND controller and can be embedded in mobile handsets to accommodate the high data storage requirements that accompany the increasing number of multimedia features on mobile phones.

So is it possible that the next-generation of iPod minis could instead use the cellphone-oriented NAND chip instead of a normal NAND memory chip? Possibly; it would certainly fit right in with Apple's recent patent filings. Nevertheless, 2 GB of storage on a cellphone is crazy, but may become necessary as wireless broadband technology evolves. In the meantime, I'm just gonna wait to see what kind of devices take advantage of the new NAND Flash memory; chances are, you will too.